Nasty, brutish and short: The life of the modern CDO

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The 2010s were a big decade for Chief Data Officers: from a standing start ten years ago, CDO has risen to become an indispensable C-suite role, with almost two thirds of Fortune 500 organizations hiring one.

But the role of CDO, especially outside the US, is still poorly defined, and CDOs are frequently not set up for success within their organizations. Is the job a poisoned chalice?

What’s next for the Digital Analytics Association?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ve been a member of the Digital Analytics Association for, it turns out, about twelve years – over half my professional life. In that time I’ve seen the organization grow and blossom into a vibrant community of professionals who are passionate about the work they do and about helping others to develop their own skills … Read more

Building your own web analytics system using Big Data tools

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It’s been a busy couple of years here at Microsoft. For the dwindling few of you who are keeping track, at the beginning of 2012 I took a new job, running our “Big Data” platform for Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD) – the division that owns the Bing search engine and MSN, as well as … Read more

Google launches cloud-based BigQuery service

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Some interesting news today: Google has fully launched the cloud-based BigQuery service that it first previewed last November. From the website: Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets—up to billions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics … Read more

Data is (are?) Beautiful

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s usually my lovely wife who blogs about jewelry, and me who blogs about charts and data, but today the tables are turned – well, almost. Wieden+Kennedy London has come up with a range of designer necklaces which celebrate the beauty of data, under the name Plot. The necklaces use charts of thirty years of … Read more

Ads in user-uploaded videos – new work from Stanford

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Those smarty-smart smart people at Stanford (which gave us Sergey and Larry, Sun, and, ahem, Jerry) have developed some software to make it possible to insert dynamic images or videos inside the environment of another video. I’m not talking about pre-rolls, post-rolls or overlays here; the inserted images/movies (which could of course be ads) are … Read more

In Excel hell?

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This will cheer you up – the world’s first Excel-based music video (I kid you not): [Via adfreak]